All that began with God, in God must end: All
lives are garnered in His final bliss: All wills hereafter shall
be one with His:When in the sea we sought, our spirits blend.
Rays of pure light, which one frail prism may rendInto
conflicting colours, meet and kissWith manifold attraction, yet
still missContentment, while their kindred hues contend.
Break but that three-edged glass:—inviolateThe sundered beams
resume their primal state, Weaving pure light in flawless
harmony. Thus decomposed, subject to love and strife, God’s
thought, made conscious through man’s mortal life, Resumes
through death the eternal unity.

Text as found in The Oxford Book of English
Mystical Verse. 1917, Nicholson & Lee, eds.

[ 5 pages, circa 4'15" ]

John Addington Symonds

John Addington Symonds (1840–1893) was in the
forefront of the "bourgeois radical" men and women with socialist
ideals who were destined to reform public opinion in the 1890s. He
was a dynamic member of a group of men concerned with art who worked
towards a revival of culture, often in conjunction with politics:
Ruskin, Pater, Rossetti, and Wilde. His specific contribution to the
regeneration of society was as a pioneer in the field of gay rights;
he was the first modern historian of homosexuality, and the first
advocate of gay liberation in Britain. Though a writer and essayist,
it was his poems which meant the most to him.

This setting is written for John Cheek, bass, who
sang a fine König Marke in the Florentine Opera's 2004 production of
Tristan und Isolde. His broad lined interpretation and
refined dignity were a joy against which to play, and hearing him so
often in rehearsal and performance gave me a fine vision of his
voice in this setting, given with respect to such a fine artist and
gentle man.

The opening gesture suggests the prism, rending into
competing harmonic colors the whole of the phrase. After a long and
lyric moderato in B-flat, a shift via a common tone modulation to
G-flat offers a return to the lyric line and opening gesture
transposed, yet in a large structural arc, as all that begins must
end in a "unity." That which "resumes through death" holds no fear,
but thankfully awe.

The score for The Prism of Life is available
as a free PDF download, though any major commercial performance or
recording of the work is prohibited without prior arrangement with
the composer. Click on the graphic below for this piano-vocal score.